Filip Müller

Filip Müller (3 January 1922 – 9 November 2013) was a Slovak man who was one of the Jewish Sonderkommando members who survived Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German extermination camp of World War II.

He witnessed the extermination of Jews and lived to write one of the key documents of the Holocaust; his 1979 memoir published as the Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers, a first-hand account of the genocide perpetrated by Germans at Auschwitz.

Müller was born in Sereď, in the Czechoslovak Republic. In April 1942, at the age of twenty, Müller came with one of the earliest Holocaust transports to Auschwitz. He was given prisoner number 29236 and assigned to work in the construction of crematoria and installation of the gas chambers. As member of the Sonderkommando, he witnessed "the families, the townships and the cities of Jewish people come." He was ordered to burn the dead bodies in ovens. Cremating corpses was the only reason why the Germans kept him alive.

The daily arrivals of men, women and children at Auschwitz were met by Müller's Sonderkommando unit in the so-called cleaning area. Müller would tell the prisoners that they were somewhere safe as he worked around them getting the gas chambers ready.

After the Jews had been exterminated in the gas chambers, his role was to enter the gas chambers with other workers and to search and sort the bodies by size and fat content − to further maximize how many bodies could be burned per hour. Then he and the other unit members would move and load the bodies into the crematorium chamber and "stoke" the bodies as they burned so they burned efficiently. Their clothes were also collected and disinfected and any valuables found in them were either taken by SS officials or used by prisoners who had "organized" (stolen) them to barter with the SS officials for food or other supplies.

Müller described eating cheese and cake he found once in the gas chamber after a gassing.

After realizing what he was doing to the thousands of Jews each and every day for nearly three years, Müller said that he tried to commit suicide by attempting to enter the gas chambers himself. In his book, he said he saw a group of countrymen singing the Jewish Hatikvah and the Czech national anthem before they entered the gas chamber. He joined the group inside but after a few minutes one girl came up and spoke to him. According to Muller, she said:

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